Thread by @ActuallyAmelia

Did a survey at uni of Japanese folks on how they felt about recent releases The Last Samurai, Lost in Translation, and Memoirs of a Geisha.

Most: "Happy to see our small island nation get attention! Tom Cruise is cool!"

Few: "Disgusted that Chinese actors play Japanese."

https://twitter.com/MissRinAelia/status/1285363644830638080

This was my early 20s and social media didn't exist yet, so I was baffled. I didn't care that Zhang Ziyi was Chinese, I cared that she wasn't Japanese. I cared that Tom Cruise wasn't either. Why didn't they?

Because Japanese nationalism is inextricably linked to white supremacy.

My history on this is a little rusty, but Meiji era Japan gained clout in the west through war with big countries. It won, it colonised.

Once the League of Nations tried to put limits on this empire-building, Japan left the League and started on the path to being an Axis power.

The US has had exceptional impact on Japan, e.g. ending its isolation in 1853, occupying it 1945-1952, manipulating Japan's economy to make it a Cold War capitalist success, etc.

This deeply affected Japanese views of power, national identity, international relations - and race.

So even as the hardcore Japanese nationalists will hate white Americans, they will hate Black Americans more.

They will also hate Koreans and Chinese, members of nations Japan once impressed the West by colonising.

But white supremacy in Japan is much more insidious than that.

Racial microaggressions are everywhere in Japan, baked into systems of pop culture, politics, education, etc.

Those microaggressions are more likely to become open racial abuse if you're Black/brown/non-Japanese Asian. Look at Naomi Osaka, Hana Kimura, Ramazan Celik, many more.

And those same systems uplift whiteness. While white people can and do experience xenophobia, whiteness is routinely idealised in pop culture, politics, education, and so on.

Race in Japan is complicated for white folks. It's not for non-Japanese POC. We know white supremacy.

Japan has built up huge soft power in the West. Nihonjinron, pop culture, JET... Decades of encouraging outsiders to love a limited and/or romanticised view of Japan.

And it worked. Now those people will fight to protect that view - using Japanese nationalist talking points.

That's how we end up with non-Japanese people dismissing diaspora Japanese views as irrelevant while clinging to "I'm part-Japanese and I don't have a problem with it!" voices. They've internalised Japanese nationalism born out of US-led white supremacy. It comes naturally.

I don't subscribe to the idea that you need to be Japanese to have valid, useful commentary on Japanese pop culture. Speaking from experience, mixed race and/or diaspora folks are not immune from internalising and expressing harmful white supremacist views. But...

In a matrix of personal connection vs domain expertise, I get the most useful understanding when I hear views from 3 of the 4 quadrants. (Little to learn from people with neither connection nor expertise).

We need to analyse these views intersectionally, not in a hierarchy.

When Memoirs of a Geisha came out, I had so many questions. The geisha profession, the source material, the controversial casting, the literary, cinematic, and political circumstances surrounding all of the above!

In 2005, the voices available to me were white and/or academic.

If Memoirs of a Geisha had come out 10 years later we would have heard from mixed race and diaspora folks in Japan, China, the US and beyond, including literary, film, and politics scholars, and regular people talking about how the film affected them.

This nuance is a gift.

But the aforementioned white supremacy/Japanese nationalism circlejerk ensures this nuance is flattened, derailed, gatekept.

That's why we saw the same conversations on pre-social media 2003's The Last Samurai as on 2017's Ghost in the Shell. More should have changed.

But that's white supremacy for you. It's strong, and its roots are deep.

I'm grateful for the mixed and diaspora Japanese folks speaking out, translating, and signal-boosting a range of voices to challenge the nationalist idea of Japan as a monolith. You ARE making a difference.

Credit to this thread goes to Black Lives Matter, and the Black thinkers and leaders I've been learning from since Ferguson but have really properly studied over the past few months. I have so much to learn, but already my thinking is so far beyond where it was a year ago.